When we first put together a comment reply page, we knew we were far from finished. We had plans to ultimately build a complete private messaging system for soLinkable. And throughout the past week we’ve been working diligently to get our new and improved messaging system up-and-running… Who am I kidding – We threw a bunch of code together at the last minute and hoped for the best.

The new messaging system offers a few improvements to soLinkable:

1. Private messaging. You can now send a private message to any user through soLinkable. This will make it even easier to communicate with the admins (or anyone else for that matter).
2. Display all messages and replies. The first page in your message center displays a collection of all messages and replies you’ve received, ordered by descending date. This includes replies to your comments, top level comments on stories you’ve submitted, and private messages (both sent and received).
3. A new eye-catching envelope link. Do you know when you have a new message or reply? Probably not. A blue envelope on a blue theme just isn’t very noticeable. So we’ve redone the image to make it stand out a little better, which will (hopefully) allow for more conversation.
4. Much faster page loads with fewer queries. We’ve done some serious optimization to the comment and messaging systems. You won’t notice a huge improvement right away, but as soLinkable continues to grow these improvements will go a long way (If you want to get a little technical, we drastically reduced our database calls, cutting the execution time by 33%).

So… How Do I Use It?

Look at the top right corner of soLinkable. Are you signed in? Do you see that envelope? Good. That’s the link to your message center. For the most part, the envelope will appear blue. However, when you have unread items in your message center, the envelope will alert you by turning a sort of orange-red:

Clicking on the envelope will bring you to the main page of the new soLinkable message center, which lists the 25 previous conversations you’ve had on soLinkable. A conversation includes any private messages, replies to your comments, or first-level comments made to a story you’ve submitted. The basic setup of the page is as follows:

• Menu Items: Easily navigate through the different screens within the soLinkable message center.
• Type Of Message: Displays information regarding the type of message. Can be either a private message, post reply, or comment reply.
• Title Bar: The who, what, and when. This information bar will indicate the username, subject (if applicable), and date of the message or comment.
• Message Body: The actual content.

Next, let’s move to the “Compose” page. This is where you’ll go to write a private message. The layout and input textboxes are pretty self-explanatory. To, Subject, Message… All basic stuff.

The error checking at this point in time is pretty basic, it just checks to ensure you’ve entered a subject, message body, and valid username – No fancy jQuery validation engines yet. However, there is some simple AJAX going on in the background to help ensure the person you’re trying to contact exists. When you move the focus away from the “To:” field, it will contact the soLinkable servers and return whether the user exits or not. Simple but handy.

The Indox/Sent folder contains a list of all messages, beginning with the newest first:

And finally, clicking the subject will open it up in the view message template:

More improvements to come

It’s still in a beta phase, so expect some minor changes in the next few days as we try to work out the kinks. And if you’ve never played the role of a beta tester but always wanted to, here’s your chance. Play around with it and let us know what you think: Are there any bugs? Is it intuitive and easy-to-use? What would you do differently?

So get on it – Check out the soLinkable message center!

comment, feature, messaging, solinkable

What exactly does that mean? Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). If you are a frequent Reddit commenter you will be very familiar with it as it uses the same system.

How does this benefit you, the commenter? The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

How does it work? A full instructional guide can be found under syntax on the project website or check out the Dingus to try out a live version of Markdown. But first, let me give you a quick and easy overview:

Paragraphs are delimited by a blank line. Simply starting text on a new line won’t create a new paragraph; It will remain on the same line in the final, rendered version as the previous line. You need an extra, blank line to start a new paragraph. This is especially important when dealing with quotes or lists.

Italic text can be displayed by surrounding a word (or words) with either single asterisks (*) or single underscores (_). Bold text can be displayed by surrounding a word (or words) with either double asterisks (**) or double underscores (__).

This is in *italic text*

This is in **bold text**

Will give you:

Blockquotes are created by using email-style > characters. Multiple angle brackets can be used for nested quotes. To cause a new paragraph to be quoted, begin that paragraph with another angle bracket.

>Here's a quote.

>Another paragraph in the same quote.
>>A nested quote.

>Back to a single quote.

Will give you:

Linking can be done in two ways. First, you can just paste a valid URL, which will be automatically parsed as a link. Or, you can write the anchor text inside of square brackets – [ ] – followed by the URL in parentheses.

http://en.wikipedia.org
[wikipedia]http://en.wikipedia.org

Will give you:

Headers can be created by surrounding the text with the # symbol. The number of #’s used corresponds with the header level.

# Header 1
## Header 2
### Header 3
#### Header 4
##### Header 5
###### Header 6

Will give you:

Unordered Lists can be created by appending each element in the list with either a plus (+), dash (-), or asterisk (*) followed by a space. Operators can also be mixed.

+ Item 1
- Item 2
* Item 3

Will give you:

Ordered lists are created in roughly the same way. Begin the list with a number plus a period (.) followed by a space. It’s important to note that the actual numbers you use to mark the list have no effect on the output. The ordered list will always start with the number 1, and will increment sequentially.

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3

Will give you:

Code Blocks are created by wrapping it with backtick quotes (`).

Here is some `inline code with **formatting**`

Will give you:

Escaping special characters can be done with a backslash (\). Backslash escapes are used to generate literal characters which would otherwise have special meaning in Markdown’s formatting syntax.

Escaped \*italics\*

Will give you:

That’s it! There are other great ways to use Markdown, but we’ll leave that until later posts. Thanks to redditor AnteChronos for his great explanation as well (much of which I used in this post).

comment, feature, solinkable